Reliability of voting machines? Ahem..

28Mar08

From Wired.com: “A former technician who worked for Hart InterCivic — a voting machine company based in Texas — has alleged that his company lied to election officials about the accuracy, testing, reliability and security of its voting machines. The whistleblower says the company did so because it was eager to obtain some of the approximately $4 billion in federal funds that Congress allocated to states in 2002 to purchase new voting equipment under the Help America Vote Act (aka HAVA).”
In a separate news from Wired.com: “A preliminary investigation [in Ohio] has also uncovered a couple of additional surprises about the machines — it turns out that not only did the county fail to conduct mandatory tests on the machines before the November election, but a county programmer had also intentionally disabled an internal auditing function for logging any changes made to the machine software, possibly thwarting investigators’ ability to determine what occurred with the ballots and who was responsible. The programmer says the voting machine company advised him to disable the log to speed up the programming process.”